Poets & Art with Adela Najarro

Institute for Latino Studies

Available on-demand

How does the intersection of literary performance and visual arts foster a shared sense of heritage? Sustain your spiritual and intellectual vitality through this vibrant encounter with the verse and vision of poet Adela Najarro. Envision a future anchored in the stories that fuse cultural insight and bridge our past with the present moment through a profound dialogue of spirit and site.

Adela Najarro was the featured poet at the second event of “Poets & Art: Ekphrasis at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art,” a join initiative of the Institute for Latino Studies and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. You can read more about Adelas’ time on campus here.

For more information on Letras Latinas at the Institute for Latino Studies, please visit the Letras Latinas website.

The event commenced with opening remarks from Joseph Becherer, Director of the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, who emphasized the museum’s role as a site of hospitality and spiritual reflection. He specifically noted the cultural significance of the monthly mass held in the chapel on the Feast of St. Joseph, positioning the museum as a sanctuary for the Notre Dame community. Jason Ruiz, Director of the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), framed the evening within the institute’s twenty-five-year mission of research and community understanding. He highlighted Letras Latinas, the ILS literary initiative led by Francisco Aragón, as a “tentpole program” that has spent two decades building an essential archive of oral histories and creative convenings.

Francisco Aragón introduced the evening’s guest, poet Adela Najarro, by recalling their first encounter in 2003, which eventually led to Najarro’s inclusion in the landmark anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. Maryam Parhizkar, an ILS postdoctoral fellow, further contextualized Najarro’s work through her own “Central American Narratives” course. Parhizkar noted that while students often fear “incorrect” interpretations of poetry, Najarro’s philosophy—that a poem is not finished until the reader engages with it—liberates the audience to become active participants in the creative process.

Najarro’s presentation focused on her latest collection, Variations in Blue, and her involvement in the “Pintura Palabra“ initiative, which challenged poets to respond to the Smithsonian exhibit Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. Exploring the “feminine divine,” Najarro analyzed a triptych of works from the museum’s collection, moving from the biblical Eve to the Virgin Mary, and finally to a contemporary image of a dispossessed mother. This progression illustrated art’s ability to record the human journey and “converse with the past” to anchor our collective future.

The poet’s analysis of specific paintings provided deep cultural insights. Discussing Raphael Soriano’s Un Lugar Distante, Najarro “re-translated” diasporic nostalgia into a Martian landscape, a science-fiction metaphor influenced by Ray Bradbury. This provided the grounds to discuss her uncle, Ernesto, whose story bridged the personal and societal; Najarro noted that Ernesto died of AIDS, using the poem to confront the historical silencing of queer identities. She also explored Arturo Rodriguez’s La Tempestad, linking its kinetic energy to the modern migrant experience in the Midwest, and the “illegal landscapes” of Gronk, which capture the volatility of assimilation. Najarro concluded with Jesse Treviño’s Manos, using the image of a father’s hands to counter negative stereotypes with a narrative of labor, dignity, and care.

The Reader as Co-Creator: A fundamental gain is the conceptualization of the poem as an unfinished work that requires the reader’s presence to achieve its final form. This empowers the audience to bring their own lived experiences to the text, removing the academic barrier of the “correct” interpretation.
The “Personal as Societal” Bridge: The discussion demonstrates how specific family memories—such as a relative’s struggle with the HIV/AIDS crisis or a father’s labor—serve as strategic access points to broader societal issues, ensuring that the marginalized experience is recorded as essential history.
The Re-translation of Nostalgia: Through the lens of science fiction and the metaphor of a “Martian landscape,” the event illustrates how diasporic nostalgia can be re-translated into new, joyful metaphors. This challenges the “nostalgia tropes” often found in Latinx literature, allowing for a more complex exploration of queer and peculiar lives.
Challenging Patriarchal Structures: By focusing on the “feminine divine” and reimagining the Virgin Mary/Guadalupe as a “powerhouse for women” who “kicks the moon,” the work provides a strategic subversion of historical patriarchal narratives and an affirmation of feminine strength.
Community as the Collective Hero: A primary takeaway is that significant societal change mimics the slow, steady work of caregiving rather than the sudden violence of war. This highlights the role of collective effort and artistic collaboration as the most effective tools for building an equitable future.

“There’s a philosophy that the poem is not finished until the reader reads it.” — Adela Najarro
“Every deep act of looking has the potential to be a deep act of remembering. We never know what will surface when we stay with an image long enough.” — Maryam Parhizkar
“By engaging the past we build and anchor ourselves into the future. And what better place to do that than a museum?” — Adela Najarro
“I have found that starting in the personal makes me reach out into societal and to greater knowledge.” — Adela Najarro
“Changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war… most of the important work is collective.” — Adela Najarro